Aging Quotes

They were growing closer and closer every day, and Charlotte was finding something magical at Wildflower, something she never thought she would find again—love.

~ Lindsay Detwiler

My features have blunted with the passage of time, my reflection only faintly resembles how I see myself. Gravity demands payback for the years my body has resisted it.

~ Rabih Alameddine

My countenance in my old-age does injustice to my heart. John Quincy Adams

~ Paul C. Nagel

I feel as if I am being left out, as though I’m some straggler and people can’t quite remember to stay back for me.

~ Marilynne Robinson

As she drove the familiar route to the school, she considered her magnificent new age. Forty. She could still feel forty the way it felt when she was fifteen. Such a colorless age. Marooned in the middle of your life. Nothing would matter all that much when you were forty. You wouldn't have real feelings when you were forty, because you'd be safely cushioned by your frumpy forty

~ Liane Moriarty

Just as apples when unripe are torn from trees, but when ripe and mellow drop down, so it is violence that takes life from young men, ripeness from old. This ripeness is so delightful to me that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem, as it were, to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

It occurred to Jeff that he had entered the vague phase of his life. He had a vague idea of things, a vague sense of what was happening in the world, a vague sense of having meant someone before. It was like being vaguely drunk all the time.

~ Geoff Dyer

My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

~ W.b. Yeats

We must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

How can you become old in spirit? Only by carrying the past, isn't it? If you carry sixty years of burden with you, you're sixty years old. If you don't carry anything, you're like a newborn. The physical body may develop limitations, but the way you are has no limitations. It simply has no limitations. You are this many years old or that many years old simply because you carry that many years of garbage with you.

~ Sadhguru

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

~ Leon Trotsky

And since a more convincing argument could not be found—aside from a fatal accident or suicide—this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.

~ Mircea Eliade

Old age. I don't know when it really starts, and I'm not interested in finding out. Julia pretty much ignored the whole thing, and that may be the only real lesson there is for the end of our days. Just pretend like it isn't happening, until you have no choice but to accept reality. If you're lucky, like Julia, you'll die peacefully in your sleep after having enjoyed a dinner of onion soup.

~ Karen Karbo

A wedding is allegedly one of the most wondrous experiences in a woman’s life. All attending her presence are to make the occasion completely about her. Her beauty in that sliver of time is to be suspended in eternity so that ten years, thirty pounds and two kids later, she may sigh at the princess she once was.

~ Kenn Bivins

He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend.

~ Abigail Thomas

The important part of growing older was the growing part. Resisting change meant forever standing still, which was a sad way to live.

~ Barbara Delinsky

There are only four kinds of people in the world.Those who have been caregivers.Those who are currently caregivers.Those who will be caregivers, and those who will need a caregiver.

~ Rosalyn Carter

Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.

~ Naomi Jackson

Her face is silting up, like a pond; layers are accumulating. Every once in a while, when she can afford the time, she spends a few days at a spa north of the city, drinking vegetable juice and having ultrasound treatments, in search of her original face, the one she knows is under there somewhere; she comes back feeling toned up and virtuous, and hungry.

~ Margaret Atwood

Napping is divine, but I no longer have all the time in the world.

~ Abigail Thomas

There's nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.

~ Anthony Marra

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

~ Abigail Thomas

Wow. Look at the lines in your face, Missy. It's like your bitterness just dug in and stayed.

~ Shelly Laurenston

At the other end of the room the three old men discussed infirmities, exchanging symptoms in undertones as boys might speak of lust.

~ Shirley Hazzard

I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years...but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the passion of youth. And I live again. I feel something.

~ J.j. Brown

He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

~ Karen Thompson Walker

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different.I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.

~ Lord Dunsany

Those whose lives have been an exercise in the pitting of their wits, or the selling of their talents, time and strength, to those who pay the piper, can even in their old age, even with their wits partially gone, automatically practise defences, and appeal for aid. But not so those who have never asked, who have never bargained.

~ Norah Houlton

Nobody likes the A word, but everyone ages. You can have an aging in place master suite that looks like a resort hotel, rather than a rehab hospital room.

~ Jamie Gold

.. at a certain age we learned to see right through it, and that age is now.

~ Anna Quindlen

And I'm not going to get any thinner or any younger, my ass is going to hit the ground, if it hasn't already--and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I'm still in here. And I don't want to be resented or despised for changing...I'd rather be alone.

~ Zadie Smith

Something I really enjoy about older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don't sweat the imperfections.

~ Rob Sheffield

...as he was combing his hair in front of the mirror...only then did he understand that a man knows when he is growing older because he begins to look like his father.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.

~ Timothy Schaffert

As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.

~ Andrew Solomon

They say older folks need less sleep, so I must not be old yet.

~ Paul Carlson

People don't get gentler as they get older but rather, harder.

~ Catherine Bailey

Past age fifty-five, I experienced the advancement of exquisite fabric choices, paint distinctions that were celestial in scope, yet so many other man-made objects, such as people, became drab, redundant and boring.

~ Carol A. Elliott

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.

~ Alan Bradley